Monday Link-A-Mania

Youngblood; Torchwood; New York Comic-Con; Witches Of Eastwick: Zombies Of Mass Destruction

Ratner To Direct Youngblood X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner could be accused of damning his next project behind the lens with faint praise. He's been announced as the helmer for big screen comic-book adaptation Youngblood, based on Rob Liefeld’s iconic graphic novel about a superhero team sanctioned and overseen by the US government, which apparently will be renamed Infinity for the film version. Ratner told Variety : "Most of the great graphic novels are gone, and Youngblood is one of the few comicbooks left with tentpole potential.” Don’t get too excited, Brett. Oh, okay, he tries to sound a bit more committed later on: "It was a real personal passion project for me, and a lot of people wanted to do it, but the amazing thing about the guys at [production company] Reliance is the speed with which they’re able to move.”

Eve Miles Talks Children Of Earth Sci Fi Wire has an interview with Eve (Gwen) Myles about the new Torchwood mini-series, Children Of Earth: “It's quite important that everybody knows in between the second and third series, we did a Radio 4 audio drama and a small stint on Doctor Who so the grieving process for our characters were dealt with in that time period. The characters went out with a bang—super characters, fantastic storylines. They'll be legends forever. But there is a strong essence of them all the way through this one. They highlight more than anything that life is very short and dangerous in Torchwood. They are the biggest symbols of that this year, ... but life carries on in Torchwood."

AS for the new five-part format for the mini-series, she reveals: "I think the stronger storylines of the last seasons are the ones that were spread out over four, five and six episodes. I'm not saying if we were to go back to 13 parts, I wouldn't enjoy it. It's all challenging, but this particular format and this story has allowed us to explore Gwen much deeper in a much more layered way. We had fun with it and played around with it where with individual episodes you don't really have time to do that. I also think it helps that everyone knows what Torchwood is now so we don't have to explain it anymore, and what you see in this series is just the team trying to do their job and doing the best way they possibly can. It's really awesome."

Nutter For Eastwick The king of the pilots, David Nutter, will hoping his magic will work once again with the pilot for the new US TV version of The Witches of Eastwick. As Variety points out, Nutter has an unblemished record when it comes to pilots: out of the 14 he's directed 14 have gone to series, including Supernatural, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Mentalist, Smallville and Dark Angel.

Zombies Of Mass Destruction Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain have been hired to adapt the Red 5 comic ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction for Benderspink, according to The Hollywood Reporter . The story concerns an elite team of soldiers sent on a covert operation into hostile territory in the Middle East to stop what they soon discover to be a government-created army of the undead. Blackman and McCain co-wrote Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and wrote and directed Outlander.

A Taste Of The New York Comic-Con Wanna get a taste of the New York Comic Con that took place last week? Then pop along to Coming Soon . which has posted over 110 pics from the event. Sadly none of them are captioned (unless it just a Mac thing, and PC users can find pop-up captions*), so you have to make some educated guesses about some of them. (*Believe it or not, because we work on Macs, if we try to create pop-up captions for this site, we can’t actually read them! D’Oh! That’s why we rarely bother, in case you were wondering...)